Managing Britannia
Robert Protherough and John Pick
Robert Protherough and John Pick have worked at universities in many countries, including the UK, the USA, Russia, Canada and Kenya.
Keywords: Ideologies, Managerial economics, United Kingdom
Abstract British economic and political culture is in the grip of a new cult of "managerialism". This shares with previous modernist ideologies a blend of utopian abstraction and utilitarian activity. Managerialism, the authors believe, has become a threat both to economic competence and historic freedoms. It eschews any sense of history and blurs the division between public and private activity and extends the intrusive role of the state.
There are times when whole civilisations become obsessed with a single route to salvation – one simple political formula that will magically cleanse society of its impurities, rout all enemies, and lay the foundations of a new order. Over time, history shows us that each of these panaceas loses its attraction, but not before it has taken a damaging toll on the human spirit. So we should be wise to acknowledge the growth of a sinister new obsession, more dangerous because its application is so widespread and it is encouraged by all shades of political opinion. That is the insidious new cult to which we have given the name "modern managerialism".
Like its predecessors, the cult of modern managerialism claims to provide a comprehensive solution of every kind of problem. It has been adopted with increasing enthusiasm over the last 20 years by successive British governments,who have seen in it a means of harnessing the total managerial systems of the global corporations to the maintenance of the nation state. It has grown during that time primarily through the imposition of its robotic terminology, not just upon the service sector, but also upon a range of educational and cultural activities which had previously been thought to lie outside the boundaries of state control. The result is that the British people can no longer be proud of their individual achievements – they can only strive to achieve their allotted "targets" and "deliver agreed outcomes" in a way that satisfies government planners.
For the new managerialist state, while professing the virtues of free market choice, nevertheless seeks to control every aspect of its citizens' lives. In it, there is no longer space for private, domestic or purely amateur activities. Every kind of human endeavour, however remote it may once have been from the tentacles of state control, is now spoken of as an "industry", which must be organised, funded and assessed by the state, according to the state's centrally-imposed industrial targets. Our doctors are now, at least in government eyes, part of the "health industry", our athletes part of the"sporting industry", our social workers and our charities part of the chain of "caring industries". And every activity or process, from parenting to churchgoing, is now assumed to be of value only when it contributes to the wealth and political image of what is now unblushingly termed "Great Britain plc" or – though this term has latterly fallen from favour– "New Britain".
As "Great Britain plc" consists of nothing more than a collection of state-defined industries, then it follows that it can all be centrally regulated and managed by the state's ever-swelling packs of managerial watchdogs. Our hospitals, universities, arts centres and libraries can be measured and assessed by their conformity to their various quantitative "outcomes" rather than by the judgements formerly made about their professional competence. Thus a surgeon who discovers complications during an operation and who then immediately deals with the newly-discovered problems may be conforming to the Hippocratic Oath, but will be risking the hospital's position in the league tables, for other operations scheduled for that day may have to be postponed, and the number of operations postponed is one of the "outcomes" by which the hospital is judged, and, ultimately, financed.
At every level modern managerialism involves a sacrifice of quality to quantity. In Great Britain plc it is the numbers of people passing through the Tate Modern building, rather than the challenge and excitement of art, which is the yardstick of success. In the managerialist state creativity, innovation,ambition, enterprise – as well as critical awareness – become quantifiable entities which politicians assume can be readily fostered,Soviet-fashion, by state control and manipulation. It was not the Cultural Commissar of the old USSR, but a British Cabinet Minister who recently boasted:
If you compare the census figures for 1981 and 1991 … there was,on average, a 34 percent increase in the number of individuals with cultural occupations over the ten-year period. Clothing designers showed an 88 percent increase; artists and graphic designers a 71 percent increase; and authors,writers and journalists a 43 percent increase.
Thus Chris Smith in his 1998 collection of his own Ministerial speeches, Creative Britain. In New Britain, as in the old Soviet Union, it is assumed that each increase in the quantity of trousers, silk screens and newsprint produced each year is a positive cultural sign.
If the first distinguishing mark of the new managerialist state is the way it slyly imposes industrial and managerial terminology upon every human activity,the second is the way in which it elevates the practice of management above every other kind of professional expertise. It is now managers who run our health centres, our hospitals, our schools and our social services, managers who control and set the goals even of professionals with long experience of their own fields. Unlike real professionals however, managers can flit from one well-paid field to another, because modern management is now thought to be a readily-transferable skill. It is this fact, more than any other, which sets"Great Britain plc" apart from its history.
By contrast in the first industrial revolution a business was always led and managed by someone who intimately understood its processes and needs, as Thomas Cook understood railways, Jesse Boot understood pharmacy. The thought of them changing managerial roles so that Boots the chemist managed holiday excursions would have been thought ridiculous. Yet now the regular exchange of managers is thought perfectly natural. So the lady who briefly managed the Millennium Dome moved on to lend her managerial expertise to the boards of Railtrack and Equitable Life. In return Railtrack was run by a soft drinks manufacturer, while the man who restructured the management of the BBC (to the satisfaction of the government, if not its employees or the general public) now advises the Prime Minister on transport policy.
Nowhere has the cult of "modern managerialism" been more evident than in the UK's universities. More than one in seven university students now enrols in management studies, even though the claims of "Management" to be a coherent academic subject are hotly disputed – not least from within the management departments themselves. And, even more damagingly, modern management practices have infiltrated the core of academic thinking, so that the work of university staff is now judged less by its intrinsic quality than by its immediate and easily-identifiable "outcomes" – the quantity of work newly published, the number of recent citations of the teacher's work, the amount of new research money attracted. Long-term research interests and professional excellence in teaching count for virtually nothing. It is not surprising therefore that new graduates are increasingly being asked to bring to their interview evidence, not just of their routine firsts and upper seconds,but of their scores at "A" level (awarded before they entered the fail-safe production lines of the modern university) so that a more accurate assessment may be made of their potential.
For there is – as we know from the first reactions to our book – a growing dissatisfaction with the practices of modern managerialism. It can be seen in many small instances. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, immediately his appointment was announced, made it his business to denounce the widespread use of league tables as a managerial incentive. The teaching profession has been highly scornful of the Education Minister for saying that the purpose of increasing financial investment in the education system was primarily to "target"it to "close the skills gap between rich and poor". When the director of a national opera company was recently sacked by the board for failing to achieve some managerial targets, the newspapers were full of letters from musicians and performers objecting to the action and saying that, in spite of all the government propaganda, the arts were not a "business like any other".
The dawning of disillusionment must largely be laid at the door of the Millennium Dome. Intended as the supreme triumph of modern management of the New Britain, the cult of managerialism was in the event its nemesis. For there could have been no clearer illustration of the fact that modern managerialism does not work. Through the long spinning years of its gestation, its highly-paid posses of consultants, advisers and strategic planners left us in no doubt as to its"targets" – there would be at least 12.5 million visitors –nor the "outcomes" it would produce – it would have a "wow factor" and send each of its visitors home "with an exciting story to tell about New Britain". The trouble was that its modern managers did not possess the old-fashioned professional expertise which might have produced these results. They discounted the advice of the professional showmen, impresarios and entertainers who might have assisted them and instead turned to the massed ranks of management consultants who now haunt the corridors of power. The result was as sad as it was predictable. The Dome was, and remains, an embarrassing failure. It stands still as a monument to the flawed belief that modern managers can by manipulation of industrial "outcomes" ever truly affect the quality of our emotional, moral or aesthetic lives.
Managing Britannia recounts many such stories – sometimes sadly hilarious, sometimes just sad – where the target-getting and the frantic"spinning" of modern managers has left things much worse than they were before. Based on that wealth of evidence it insists that modern managerialism is not the answer to, but the cause of many of the UK's difficulties. Yet it does not gloat. It points to evidence that our infatuation with bogus management techniques may be coming to an end. And it calls for a return to an earlier and more sensible form of management in which managerial power is not detached from professional expertise, and where different kinds of enterprise are each managed in different ways.
For a language truly to exist, it must not just be spoken and written by the ruling powers, it must also be responded to and understood by the public at large. The brutal and colonising language of modern managerialism is now habitually spoken by politicians and by power-hungry bureaucrats in all fields. It finds it way into all kinds of official documents. It is the language of all the grey spokespersons for all of our shadowy new "industries". Yet there is no need for the rest of us to sanctify its use by accepting it as a substitute for plain English. Instead of trying to puzzle out for ourselves what it is that the modern managerialists are trying to say, we can, politely but repeatedly, ask them to recast their thoughts in the common tongue. As we say in our concluding chapter, it is essential that the English language be rescued from the grasp of such bureaucrats, with the conceited assumption that they alone inhabit the "real" world:
In the managerial lexicon, British citizens may no longer be commended for being gentle, amateur, scholarly, patriotic, modest, unambitious, dutiful,charitable or sportsmanlike. To be taken seriously modern Britons must be ambitious, entrepreneurial, hard-nosed, interventionist, focused, work-centred and, above all, committed to modern managerialism.
It is time to have done with this "modern managerialism", to restore sound managerial practice to those places where it is clearly needed and once more to talk to each other in English. We hope that the publication Managing Britannia is a step towards these desirable ends.
Managing Britannia is published by Edgeways Books, 6 Greencroft Avenue, Corbridge, Northumberland NE45 5DW, £18 (hardback), 212 pp.; 2002,ISBN No. 0-907839-68-1.
